Axe: Conservative donors should ask for refunds

Senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said on Thursday that besides the president's reelection, the other good news from 2012 is the failure of conservative super PACs.

"If I were one of those billionaires [who donated to them] ...I'd be wanting to talk to someone and asking where my refund is, because they didn’t get much for their money," he said on a conference call with reporters, noting that Democrats gained seats in the Senate and the House as well as the presidency. "Just looking at the results, the heartening news is that you can’t buy the White house, you can't overhwlem the Congress with these super PAC dollars."

He singled out Karl Rove and the Crossroads groups.

"I think there’ll be reluctance in the future when Mr. Rove and others come knocking on the door because of what happened on Tuesday," Axelrod said.

A study released Wednesday by the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for more transparency in campaign finance, concluded that American Crossroads got a 1 percent return on investment while Crossroads GPS got a 14 percent return. Some groups supporting Democrats, on the other hand, got as much as 85 percent.